Questions on Debating, the Second Coming, and the Atonement

KEVIN HARRIS: Hey, good to see you! Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. I want you to stay close because in the coming days we’ve got Dr. Craig’s response to a video that really goes after, not only Dr. Craig, but goes after the kalam cosmological argument. The video uses some real heavy-hitters in the world of philosophy and cosmology and science to go after Dr. Craig. And “go after him” is just the best way that I can describe it. Some of you may have seen this video. We are going to begin a series responding to that video very soon. We think it is necessary to do a series on it because of the quality of the people who are interviewed on this video. So stay close for that. This was produced in the U.K. by the way. And speaking of the U.K., today we’ve got a special Reasonable Faith podcast. Dr. Craig was recently interviewed in the U.K., and you are going to hear from Justin Brierley and others asking him some good questions. Let’s get into that now. By the way, keep in mind that you can always donate to the ongoing ministry of Reasonable Faith all over the world when you go to ReasonableFaith.org. We always appreciate that. Thanks.

RUTH: William Lane Craig – this might be really hard to whittle down, but has there been any highlights over your career? I mean, you have debated people all over the world. You've done lots of different things. If you could whittle it down, what have some of those highlights been?

DR. CRAIG: I think the debate that was really the highlight of my debating ministry was a debate held at the University of Cambridge at the Cambridge Union^[1] which is the oldest debating society in the world. So it was a tremendous privilege to be debating there. I was partnered with Peter Williams and our opponents were Andrew Copson and Arif Ahmed. The proposition under debate was whether or not belief in God is a delusion. This was in the heyday of Richard Dawkins, and so that topic was very hot at the time. The setting for this debate was what made it so memorable. The Cambridge Union is reminiscent of the House of Commons with benches rising on both sides, and we would sit down in the well and speak in the well to these benches of the audience. And then there was a gallery circling the entire room up at the top packed with students. The debate was a British-style debate, not an American-style, such as I'm used to. What that meant was that anybody in the audience could interrupt you at any moment with a point of order, and you had to call on a certain minimum number of these people and respond impromptu to whatever they asked. So you really had to be on your toes. In this debate you could just sense a lot of emotional bias against the Christian position. Dawkins was so popular at the time. You could sense in the audience that there was a real skepticism. I spoke second. Peter laid out our opening case, and then I spoke after one of the opponents spoke. I just had the feeling as I walked in the well, speaking to the students all around me, that it was like trying to turn a great ocean liner very slowly into a different direction. After the debate was over, the students voted by exiting through two doorways, one marked “Aye” and one marked “No.” Then the counters would tabulate the vote based on which doorway people exited through. Then we retired to the student bar upstairs. Several minutes later a girl carrying a ledger came into the bar area ringing a brass bell and announcing the verdict on the debate. As it turned out, Peter and I won the debate. This was just a marvelous, memorable experience of having the privilege of debating at Cambridge.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: Yeah. I remember it myself. It was part of our Reasonable Faith Tour that you were on in the U.K. back in 2011. There were some other very memorable interactions. I hosted one of them in London with Stephen Law. The one that stands out more recently to me is the marvelous interaction you had last year with Sir Roger Penrose on my Big Conversation series which was a real treat.^[2]

DR CRAIG: I'm not trying to butter you up, Justin, but that was an extraordinary opportunity to talk to a man who was to win the Nobel Prize in physics, one of the greatest physicists of all time, about these deep philosophical questions that arise out of modern physics. That was almost a magical dialogue.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: I'll tell you what. If there's someone in the comments on Facebook and YouTube who could post a link to both of those debates, I'm sure people would appreciate having the links to them given that Bill's already spoken of them. Let's turn to some of the questions that have been sent in. Ruth, I think you're going to kick us off, aren't you?

RUTH: Yeah. There's a huge range of questions, Bill, but this is from Kwaku. I'm definitely going to butcher his surname here. . . . I apologize hugely if I've got that wrong. He asks basically: “What if you want to start on apologetics? Where are some of the places that you can go?” I suppose he's coming from a place of not really knowing anything about apologetics. Where are some of the places that you can begin to start with apologetics?

DR. CRAIG: I would recommend that you get a very elementary beginner's book and start there. I would recommend Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ which, though written on an elementary level, is very substantive in its argument and evidence. Or my own book, On Guard, is intended to be a kind of primer for the beginner in apologetics to equip him to offer a positive defense of the existence of God and God's decisive self-revelation in Jesus and to answer the principal atheist objections against these arguments. So those two resources I would recommend.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: Thank you Bill. I hope that helps Kwaku. Now, Bill, you're well known for your work on the historical Jesus, particularly around the resurrection and obviously the atonement now most recently. Chris asks, “I struggle with Jesus and the resurrection. The way Jesus spoke it sounded like he would return sooner than some of his disciples even thought he would return in their lifetime. So why hasn't Jesus returned yet?”

DR. CRAIG: I think it's very important to see that in fact his problem isn't with the resurrection. There's no argument there against the resurrection of Jesus. His problem is with the return of Christ – the so-called delay of the parousia, the delay of the return of Christ. In that respect I think the evidence for the resurrection can help to bolster our faith when confronted with doubts like this. If we have really good sound evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, as I think we do, that can enable us to hold on to Christian faith even in the face of the delay of the parousia. I have addressed this in my Defender's class in the section on Doctrine of the Last Things.^[3] What I argue there is that when you look at the predictions of Jesus’ return that are found on Jesus’ lips in the Gospels that they're very often (or at least sometimes) taken out of context, and that in the original context they may not have . . . that the return would occur soon or during the lifetime of Jesus’ disciples. In fact, there are other sayings of Jesus where he anticipated a very long delay before his return and that no one in fact knows the time of his return. So I think when you put all of those facts together it can help us to believe that Christ will return someday to roll up the scroll of human history, bring the universe to an end, even though we may not know exactly when this will occur.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: I suppose just to kind of come back on that. I think a lot of people feel like, when the apostle Paul especially talks about the return of Christ, it does feel quite imminent – that he was expecting that within the lifetime of the communities. Perhaps that attitude changed a little in his later letters as you see him addressing people's concerns about “Has the end come?” or “What about those who have died?” and so on. And he's encouraging them. Was it possible that there was an expectation even if it was possibly mistaken among the early church?

DR. CRAIG:: Certainly, that can be true. At the end of the Gospel of John, you remember, the author is very concerned to correct the misimpression that the beloved disciple would not die before the return of Christ. The author says, “Jesus didn't say that. What Jesus said was ‘If he should live until I returned, what is that to you? You follow me.’” So certainly there could have been expectations of that sort. But my point is: are these grounded in the teachings of Jesus? Did Jesus himself teach something false about the imminence of his return? And my argument is that he didn't. And since Paul's beliefs were derived from the teachings of the historical Jesus I think the same thing would apply there. I personally find that the hardest thing to believe about the return of Jesus is the idea that next Tuesday, say, the universe should suddenly come to an end by the return of Christ. This just seems so unbelievable that something like that could happen. But then in my reading of physical cosmology what I discovered is that eschatology is no longer just a field of theology. It's now a field of cosmology as well – physical eschatology. Cosmologists have shown that if the universe is hung up in a kind of unstable vacuum state that all of a sudden the universe could quantum tunnel to a lower energy state which would have a sweeping and devastating effect upon the entire universe bringing about a new set of laws of nature, a complete dissolution of the universe in which we live, and this could happen tomorrow. Because it's quantum, it's indeterminate – and nobody knows. So you have the same kind of imminence in physical eschatology that we also have in theology.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: That is a really interesting point. Ruth, I think you've got our next question.

RUTH: Yeah, so I suppose moving away from eschatology but still thinking about the theme of death and things like that, Michael has a question (and this is actually from the Reasonable Faith Facebook page). He says, “If Jesus paid the debt for everyone's sin then why does anybody go to hell since the debt for their sins has already been paid?”

DR. CRAIG: I think that on the basis of Christ's satisfaction of divine justice that his atoning death is sufficient for all persons to be saved and pardoned but that it is on the basis of Christ's satisfaction of divine justice that God offers us a pardon for sin which we are then free to accept or reject. Just as when the king or the queen pardons someone, that person can refuse the pardon and then still be held liable for the crimes that he has committed. So a person can refuse the pardon that Christ has won in which case his death is unavailing for us. I don't agree with the Calvinist who thinks of the atonement as sort of a done deal at the cross. I think that although divine justice has been satisfied at the cross, it needs to be applied historically to people's lives as they hear the message of the Gospel and respond to God's offer of a free pardon. And they are then free to accept or to reject that pardon.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: Bill, I've got a couple of questions that sort of carry on from that in many ways, and they're on the issue of universalism. The first one is from someone called Mike who says, “Would you please speak a little towards why you think universalism is untenable perhaps in relation to David Bentley Hart's new book, And All Shall Be Saved.” I don't know if you've come across Hart's new book.

DR. CRAIG: I haven't read the book but my arguments would be simply biblical arguments. It seems to me that both Jesus and the other authors of the New Testament clearly taught that not everyone would be saved, but that those (as Paul says) who receive the free gift of righteousness will come to justification and glorification and so forth. I'm told that Jesus warned more of the dangers of hell than he spoke of the promise of heaven. I think the historical Jesus believed that not everyone would be saved. You remember the saying about the broad gate and the wide path that leads to destruction and the many that go in there compared to the narrow gate and the hard path that leads to life. Just honestly, it would be nice to believe in universalism but I don't think that's what the New Testament authors believed in.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: This is obviously one that has a few people interested though. Another one here asks on the same subject, “How do you square God being all-loving with exclusivism? Surely if God is all-loving he sent prophets to all parts of the world all through history and is more interested in love than doctrinal details i.e specifically what you believe”.

DR. CRAIG: Well I would certainly agree with that. I used to speak of Christian exclusivism, but then I changed my terminology because I think that that is a prejudicial word. It gives the impression that God is trying to exclude people from salvation when in fact I think he's trying to include as many as he can. If you think about it, the opposite of universalism ought to be called particularism – Christian particularism. So that's the terminology that I now adopt. It is that not everyone will be saved but some will be saved and some will be lost. If you ask for a defense of Christian particularism it would be based upon human freedom. I think that God's will, as it says in 1 Timothy 2:14, is that every person be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. But people have freedom of the will to reject God's love and forgiveness and so to separate themselves from God irrevocably. And God respects that freedom of choice.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: Ruth, go ahead.

RUTH: I suppose staying on the theme of God being a loving God but changing tact slightly there's a question here which I'm sure is echoed by many people. This came through on the Unbelievable YouTube. The question is, “Why did God send COVID? Does he enjoy watching people suffer?”

DR. CRAIG: Well, I don't think that God enjoys people's suffering. I can't think of any reason in the Bible to say that. But neither should we think that COVID was necessarily sent by God. I mean, it could have been. Who knows? But it could be just the result of evil doing. Justin and I talked about this last time about the carelessness that may have taken place in that Chinese lab that released this virus into the world. So this could again be the kind of intertwining of natural evil and moral evil that so often seems to occur. So we shouldn't necessarily think that this is something sent by God. But certainly we should say that it's something he permitted to happen because he could have stopped it if he wanted to. But he permitted it to occur, and I think that whenever God permits suffering and evil in the world he does so with a view toward a grander purpose that justifies that permission of suffering or evil. If you ask me what that purpose is, I would say that in the broadest terms God's purpose is to bring as many people freely to salvation as he can and that it may well be the case that only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil that the optimal number of persons would freely come to find God's love and forgiveness. I find that not at all implausible. When you look at the places in the world today where Christianity is growing at its most rapid rates, it will be in countries that have experienced terrible natural and moral evil such as Ethiopia, China, Indonesia, El Salvador, and other places, whereas in the indulgent nations of Western Europe and North America the growth rates are pretty much flat. Someone has actually asked me why is it that God has not blessed the nations of Europe and North America with more suffering in order to bring them to salvation? It may be they that are disadvantaged and not the nations of Africa and Asia and South America.

JUSTIN BRIERLEY: As C. S. Lewis famously said, pain is often God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. I've always found that illustration you use, Bill, very helpful.

DR. CRAIG: I think that that is just sociologically demonstrable. As I say, when you look at those countries in the world where the most people are becoming Christians and the church is growing most rapidly, I think it just gives empirical evidence to Lewis’ suggestion.^[4]